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    47 months ago

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    From the extensive research that she has done, Forbus has become a fairly savvy investor; she’s familiar with all of the major funds and has 60 percent of her money in stocks and the rest in fixed income, which is generally the recommended ratio for people who are some years away from retiring.

    With Americans now aging out of the work force in record numbers — according to the Alliance for Lifetime Income, a nonprofit founded by a group of financial-services companies, 4.1 million people will turn 65 this year, part of what the AARP and others have called the “silver tsunami” — the holes in the retirement system are becoming starkly apparent.

    But he explained to me that the remorse he expressed had nothing to do with 401(k)s themselves, which he said had helped convert millions of Americans from “spenders into savers.” Rather, what he regretted was the complexity of many plans — he thought a lot of employees were overwhelmed by all the investment options — and the fact that the financial-services industry profited from them to the degree that it did.

    A few years ago, Kevin Hassett, who was chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers for a portion of Donald Trump’s presidency, became familiar with Ghilarducci’s work and sent her, unsolicited, the draft of a paper he was writing about the retirement-savings gap.

    This past January, another bipartisan collaboration — between Alicia Munnell, who was an economist in the Clinton administration and who now serves as the director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, and Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank — published a paper calling for a reduction or an end to the 401(k) tax benefit.

    Hassett has been concerned for some time that the country is drifting toward socialism — the subject of his most recent book — and part of the reason is that too many Americans are economically marginalized and have come to feel that the system doesn’t work to their benefit.


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